This page explains how to delete your Barney account and what happens to your data when you do. You do not need to install the app to read it, and you do not need our permission to delete your account.
Barney is provided by Harness the Spark Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 12936448), registered office Forma House, 40 Bowling Green Lane, Farringdon, London, EC1R 0NE.
Deleting your account from inside the app
The fastest route is in the app itself, under Settings. Deletion happens straight away. It cannot be undone, and there is no grace period.
You will be asked for your account password. That is deliberate: it means an unlocked phone left on a table cannot delete someone's account.
You choose what happens to the shared record
The record you build in Barney belongs to two people, not one. So deletion asks you which of these you want.
Delete my account only
Everything that identifies you is destroyed:
- Your username and email address
- Your password
- The communication traits you recorded, including any you wrote yourself
- Your disclosure choices, which control who could see which traits
- Your push notification token
The conversations you both took part in stay with the person you were connected to, because that record is theirs as well as yours. Where your name used to be, they see "Someone who left".
Delete everything, including the shared history
Your account is destroyed and the shared record goes with it. Every translation, Warm Word, Navigate session and insight between you and the people you were connected to is deleted.
This removes those conversations for the other person too. They are not asked first, and it cannot be undone for either of you.
Deleting your account by email
If you cannot get into the app, for any reason, email lisa@harnessthespark.com from the address on your Barney account and say which of the two options above you want.
We will confirm your identity before deleting anything, and we will respond within 30 days. In practice it is usually much sooner.
If you are not sure which option you want, you can ask, and nothing happens until you reply.
What is kept after deletion, and for how long
Encrypted backups. Routine backups are kept on a rolling 14-day cycle. Encrypted off-site copies are currently held for longer while we finalise our backup retention schedule. Nobody reads a backup in the ordinary course of running the service; they exist so the service can be restored if something breaks.
Notification delivery records. A short record of whether a push notification reached a device is kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. Deleting your account unlinks these records from you straight away, and the notification token for your device is erased from them at the same moment. What remains is the bare fact that a notification of some type was sent and whether it arrived, with nothing left on it that points to you or to your phone.
Safety reports. If you reported someone, or someone reported you, that report is kept for 24 months and then deleted automatically — including the username it was made about. We are sorry to be blunt about it, but the alternative is that anyone can erase a report about themselves by deleting their account and signing up again, which would make reporting worthless for the person who needed it. Your account record is still destroyed; what survives, and only for those 24 months, is the report and the username it named.
Nothing else. Barney contains no analytics or crash-reporting software, so there is no usage profile, no event history and no behavioural record to delete. We do not sell data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use your conversations to train any AI model.
Deleting the app is not the same as deleting your account
Removing Barney from your phone stops the app running on that device. It does not delete your account or your data, and your connection would still see your name. Use one of the routes above if you want the account itself gone.
Questions
Email: lisa@harnessthespark.com
Related: our Privacy Policy explains what Barney stores and why, and our Terms of Service cover the rest.